


Silent Nights

by jojotier



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Found Family, Gen, Historical, Russo-Japanese War, Supernatural Elements, Trench Warfare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21965536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jojotier/pseuds/jojotier
Summary: The semi-immortal Lady Qianxun, the personification of the Manchu people, goes to the final night of the Battle of Mukden. With the feeling that the war would end soon, there's a sinking dread that the battle has only just begun for her.(Characters bytempeachy, who this is a gift for!)
Kudos: 1





	Silent Nights

**Author's Note:**

> Heya! Here's the second part of my secret Santa gift for the wonderful [tempeachy](https://twitter.com/tempeachy)! 
> 
> Qianxun, Xiwang and Changying are her original characters! Qian is somewhat immortal and represents the Manchu group in China, which was the ruling group of the Qing dynasty at the time but which has since become a minority, not to be confused with the Han Chinese. Xiwang and Changying are human Manchu maids of hers during this! 
> 
> I would 100% encourage you to have a look at Tempy's twitter so you can see her art and read more about her au- the amount of thoughtfulness and detail put into the research and creation of her characters is absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

Qian had long since learned how to tell when a battle was coming to an end.

It starts as a feeling, first and foremost- something tingling in the back of her skull, raw, like the tiniest pinpricks of scuttling bugs under her scalp. 

(Xiwang had been caught between trying to tell Qian to hold back and keeping quiet- had Qian been in a little bit of a better state of mind, seeing the cogs turning in the poor maid’s head as she tried to figure out which master to follow would have been adorable! But Qian, as much as she tried to will it, wasn’t able to keep her spirits up.

_ How odd,  _ Qian thought, tying her hair up as much as she could in her hurry. 

Usually the end of a battle was… good, wasn’t it?)

It continued, causing every inch of her skull to shudder under the force of feeling, the weight of her hair a comforting anchor against her back. Wires firing into empty space. The omnipresent feeling of something coming, something heavy, something that weighed her brain into her heart and weighed them down more and more.

(Changying had been uncharacteristically quiet- perhaps sensing something off about the night, or else sensing something off about Qian herself. She offered Qian a long coat, eyes downcast as the chill of winter slowly crept into the room, icy fingers scraping across the bare skin of her ankles. 

Her poor maids- so sweet, so attentive… Even when they don’t know a thing.

Qian tried to smile big and bright. “Thank you, thank you~” She said in her happiest voice.

Changying tried to smile back. It didn’t quite work but Qian didn’t have the time to say.)

The feeling was cold; a knot that twisted inside of her chest with certainty that no knife could cut through. No bullet could pierce it. It was the sort of feeling on February nights before the snow began to fall when the night sky was cloaked in pale grey-white that, for just the span of a moment, an hour, seemed to illuminate the streets more powerfully than any light of the paltry moon. 

(She’d stolen a horse from the diplomat with the hideous facial work that looked more like the thick bristles of horse brushes than hair. She didn’t remember his name at the moment and refused to. It was a handsome brown stallion with a brindled coat on its underbelly.

“Please,” Xiwang had begged, pulling her hastily thrown on jacket closer around her narrow shoulders, shivering with fear and cold. “please, please… At least take a guard. Please, just someone-”

“No.” Qian had said, only realizing her harsh tone when the girl had flinched away from her, hand twisting into the fabric. Softening, Qian said, “No. No one can come with me.”

“No one can know.”)

What she was doing wasn’t wrong in the slightest, of course- or else, it was only wrong in that anyone might have been able to see her face in the dark, running through the distance with her hair splayed to the wind and her eyes toward a destination she wasn’t able to know the way to. 

But who would be able to see in this pitch night? Who could see her in the thinnest sliver of the moon, blinded by blackness and the dazzling flare of brightened mechanical gunfire of a final fight? Who would know where to find her, holding onto her impromptu riding companion for dear life? Who even could recognize her as the woman in the veil?

(Changying suddenly threw herself in Qian’s path, just before she took off, arms outstretched and hair flying around her like the flame of her precious, foolish little soul. It took a shout from Qian and a jerk on the back of the horse’s neck to get the immense animal from running her over.

“Wait!” Changying called, face flushed even with the chill battering against the bare skin of her hands. There was no mistaking the tremble in her form of voice, spooked in a way that might not have been from the near-collision. “W-wait… Please, Qian-”

“I can’t- I have to  _ go,”  _ Qian had grit out through clenched teeth, trying to kick the horse back into gear. Changying, frenzied, threw her arms around the horse’s neck and gripped as tightly as she could. 

_ “Take us with you!”) _

The final night had settled over the battlefield.

Of course, there were always silent nights in a war. They came and went in the valleys between the peaks of bloodshed, shadowy places where death became dim and rotten. No longer did the cold light of the winter sun fill the end of lives with abrupt nothing, radiating heat and blood so crimson that it stained all thought. There was no quick, horrifying realization, no angry refusal.

The moon overhead shed only the tiniest of lights, the merest crumbs of vision, over a death that ran ugly in the veins crudely dug into the earth. In a desolate altar of war the sacrifices festered, licking wounds until their strength slowly gave way to silent, aching void. It crept along the ground where soldiers slept and coiled under Qian’s heels as she dismounted her horse on the highest vantage she could find.

(“You can’t come with me. You can’t… you can’t see what I have to. Please understand...”)

There was no official “end” to suffering. No extolled treaty nor frozen ammunition could make the pain cease. There was just the feeling that, come the morning, death would finally move on from Mukden’s slush filled fields and into the encampments of the fallen.

The battle wasn’t, in all technicality, over. There would be still more yet to go.

But Qian knew that someone was winning by the dawn.

(“I would never forgive myself.”)

The sting of a war ending was usually bitter, with a sweetness that would soon come. 

This time, there was no sweetness. All Qian could taste was iron.

It didn’t matter who won or lost. It didn’t matter how many men trudged out of the trenches here, dragging themselves to units and then to families, hoping desperately to forget. Qian’s heart panged for them, for seeing so many wounded and dying for a cause that they had no choice but to believe in, no matter how sharply it cut into her stomach. It panged for their blood, for the blind love that enabled their beloved nation to kill hers. It panged for their eyes, to just see beyond the horizon, to be plucked out in kind.

Qian’s heart panged for her two maids. How could she even begin to tell them what was on the horizon? How could she whisper to the Machu blood in their veins assurances when there were none?

A battle had ended. A war would end soon. And that was the only certain thing to focus on.

Qian took a deep breath and turned away. Closing her eyes to squeeze the tears from the corners, she began to lead the stolen horse back. It wouldn’t do, getting caught up in everything that was yet to come. Even with her heavy heart beating in her chest, begging for release, she afforded it none.

She still could do something. She could figure something out. For her people, she would do anything in her power to pause the dark storm clouds creeping on the horizon. She would move mountains to get them out of its shadow.

She would find something. She had to.

(When she returned, Qian threw her arms around Xiwang and Changying, and thanked them for their patience with her.

“Don’t worry,” Xiwang said in a quavering voice, “we didn’t tell anyone.”

“No one even noticed,” Changying tried to smile in that broad way of hers, “no one but us.”

Qian just smiled, resting her chin on Changying’s head and squeezing Xiwang closer. “... Tomorrow, let’s go shopping. It’ll be my treat!”)


End file.
